If I want to seriously study ancient history and history in general, should I learn any other languages?
>>1204411
>>1204408
Nah
My /his/tory professor got a lot of mileage out of learning latin, greek, and other languages as a literature undergrad and ancient history major. He's translated a few books including Summa Theologica and praises the insight that comes as a result of such close time spent with a book in the process of it's translation.
>>1204408
If you learn ancient greek, kilwriting and hieroglyphs, you can study the source and not the translation of it.
You need Latin, acient greek in you want to do antique stuff. For the main sientific literature english, french, german, spanish and italian should be enough
>>1204408
Define serious study.
If you are talking about graduate-academical level, then yes you have to. For example (given your image) If you want to know about greco-roman history not only you have to know Latin and Greek but also French (maybe) and German (definitely) because you also need to read modern scholarship that is not written in English.
>>1204408
Nah
Luckily, there have been millions of historians before you that have already done an incredible amount of research and translated everything
Learning ancient languages is redundant at this point since all historical writings have been translated multiple times already unless you want to get into the real nitty girtty of a meaning in a particular source then you can try using a lexicon or a dictionary to decipher a particular passage and there's also google translate.
You need latin
but i found that learning Italian helped me to get into latin and.opened doors for a lot.of translations
>>1204408
Ονομα μοι επιkτησις πατρος αθηνεου μητρος θεσσαλονειkεα...
I've been studying ancient Greek for a while and I'm so proud that at least I can understand the text in your pic.
